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Sep 12, 2019 · Jewish businessman Otto Frank hid his family during the Holocaust and published daughter Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl after his release from Auschwitz.
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Otto asked four of his closest employees to take care of him and his family if they would have to go into hiding. All of them agreed. The hiding place was not quite ready when Margot received a call-up on 5 July 1942 to report to a labour camp in Nazi Germany.
At the age of 53, when the systematic deportation of Jews from the Netherlands started in the summer of 1942, Otto Frank took his family into hiding on 6 July 1942 in the upper rear rooms of the Opekta premises on the Prinsengracht, behind a concealing bookcase. The day before, his older daughter, Margot, had received a written summons to ...
In July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding. The Van Pels family followed a week later. The two families already knew each other: Hermann van Pels worked for Otto’s company. Four months later, they were joined by an eighth person: Fritz Pfeffer, an acquaintance of the Frank family.
- Otto’s Worries
- Frantic Correspondence
- “Bad Luck”
- Cuba?
- No Escape
In April 1941, Otto Frank was desperate. A decade earlier, he and his wife Edith had been happily living in Frankfurt, Germany, with their two young daughters, Margot and Anne. After experiencing the first wave of antisemitic attacks instigated by the new Nazi government, Otto and Edith decided in 1933 to move to the Netherlands for safety. After a...
Nathan Straus Jr. worked for President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. He had plenty of political contacts and enough wealth to sponsor the Frank family, and immediately told Otto that he would help. Edith Frank’s two brothers, Julius and Walter Holländer, both of whom had been arrested by the Nazis during Kristallnacht, had already managed to...
On June 11, 1941, only six weeks after Frank first asked him, Straus signed five copies of an affidavit for the Frank family, agreeing to sponsor their immigration. Five days later, the National Refugee Service informed Straus that the US State Department was implementing new rules, mandating that all immigration applications had to be approved in ...
On September 8, 1941, Otto Frank wrote to Nathan Straus again, this time raising the possibility of obtaining a tourist visa to Cuba. The chances of escape were slim: the Cuban consulate had also closed in the Netherlands. Frank heard rumors that he might obtain a Cuban visa in Spain or in Germany if he could get there. He also needed at least $2,8...
On December 11, 1941, Julius Holländer telephoned the National Refugee Service to thank them for their assistance, but the efforts to help the Frank family immigrate had failed. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war against the United States, the Cuban government canceled Otto Frank’s visa application. It is likely t...
For two years, young Anne penned the daily struggles her family endured while hiding away in a secret annex of an office in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. After the war, the sole surviving member of the Frank family, Anne’s father Otto, brought the diary to the world’s attention. Without him, no one would have ever read Anne Frank's diary.
Frank, decorated for bravery as a German officer in World War I, escaped with his family from the Nazi anti-Jewish persecutions in Germany before the outbreak of World War II. Living in Amsterdam, he and his family went into hiding in 1942 to avoid deportation from the Netherlands, which was occupied by Germany in 1940.
